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About This Book
‘A learned, carefully researched, intelligently argued version of history.’—India Today In 1947, as the British left India and the subcontinent was torn apart by Partition, the future of Kashmir hung in the balance. Within a matter of weeks—amid invasion, political intrigue and hurried diplomacy—the princely state acceded to India, setting the stage for one of the world’s longest-running conflicts. In The Origins of a Dispute: Kashmir 1947, Prem Shankar Jha returns to those decisive months to ask a crucial question: how and why did Kashmir become the flashpoint it remains today? Drawing on newly declassified documents—including the Mountbatten papers and British government archives—Jha reconstructs the dramatic sequence of events that led to Kashmir’s accession to India. Moving beyond competing national narratives, he examines the roles of the Maharaja of Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah, the Pakistani-backed tribal invasion and the geopolitical calculations of Britain in the final days of empire. Clear-eyed, rigorously researched and compellingly told, this book revisits the birth of the Kashmir dispute—and reveals how a crisis born in 1947 continues to shape South Asia’s politics today.
About The Author
Prem Shankar Jha (b. December 22, 1938, Patna) was brought up in New Delhi and educated at The Doon School, Dehradun. He holds a Bachelor’s in economics from Delhi University and an MA in philosophy, politics and economics from Magdalen College, University of Oxford. In 1961, Jha joined the United Nations, spending five years with the UNDP. In 1966, he joined the Hindustan Times as an Assistant Editor, and in 1969 he moved to the Times of India. After brief stints as Acting Editor of the Economic Times (1979–80) and Editor of the Financial Express (1980–81), he returned to the Times of India as its Economic Editor. In 1986, he re-joined Hindustan Times as its Editor. In 1990, he served as the information advisor to Prime Minister V.P. Singh. He received the RedInk lifetime achievement award by the Mumbai Press Club in 2021 for his distinguished career as a journalist. Jha is a regular columnist for a number of national dailies and magazines, and has taught at Harvard University, IIM-Calcutta, the Universities of Virginia and Richmond, and at Sciences Po in Paris. His published books include Kashmir, 1947: Rival Versions of History (1966), The Perilous Road to the Market: The Political Economy of Reform in Russia, China and India (2002), The Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos, and War (2006), and India & China: The Battle Between Soft and Hard Power (2010).
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